OER Ambassador Projects 2016

The 2016 UNH OER Ambassadors are making significant changes to their Fall 2016 courses by utilizing Open Educational Resources, open pedagogy, and open source software. Some are creating new OER for their students, while others are adopting and modifying existing resources or asking their students to create OER as a course assignment. The 2016 projects reflect individual, intra-department, and inter-department collaborations.

Mark J. Bonica – College of Health and Human Services, Department of Health Management and Policy

As a result of my participation in the OER ambassador program, I was able to make two significant changes to my course: 1) my assigned librarian, Louise Buckley, was able to find an e-book version of the text in our library that my students can access for free; and 2) I have developed a semester-long case, “Wildcat Hospital and Health System” that the students will work with from the first day to the final exam. I also have 10 healthcare executives including the CEO of Catholic Medical Center, who have agreed to role play into the case in class.

Global Perspectives on the Human Condition: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Our project transforms a large, lecture-style course into a project-based, publically-available, OER material-centered introduction to cultural anthropology. During the Fall 2016 semester, our initial goals include replacing traditional textbooks with free and easily accessible educational materials, as well as finding ways to emphasize the experiential, interactive possibilities of anthropology. To this end, we have developed a series of “Anthro Labs” that will challenge students to find and communicate the real-world applicability of anthropological ideas and methods in their daily lives.

French 401 OER: French for Beginners. This course is the first of a 2-semester course and will be based this AY on a OER French text created by Gretchen Angelo, a CSULA professor. It is designed as a “flipped course”, which will free up class time for true interaction and student-centered learning. As opposed to a traditional Foreign Language course, students need not purchase the $200+ textbook and will not have to " spread themselves out" between the textbook, the online exercises website, and whatever their professor posts on the course’s web page. Everything they need will be easy to access in Canvas. Choosing this OER text will allow us via Canvas to customize content to our classes and teaching styles, while the content of the course remains coherent through out multiple sections.

John Gibson – College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Department of Math and Statistics

This fall I am restructuring a junior-level applied math course, Math 753 Numerical Methods, using Open Educational Resources (OER). The course will use existing open, online course materials and optional low-cost books in place of an expensive required textbook. We will also use the cutting-edge open-source Julia programming language in place of the proprietary and expensive Matlab system, and an open course website in place of Canvas. This OER project is part of a five-year NSF-funded project to introduce Julia into the UNH scientific computing curriculum. I am very excited to promote open education and open software at UNH!

Meg Heckman – College Liberal Arts, Department of English

Students in entrepreneurial journalism will use publicly available articles, case studies and other materials to learn about the business challenges and opportunities in the modern media landscape. They'll put that knowledge to use as they create, launch and operate a podcasting network that will be available to the general public. Later in the term, students will act as innovation consultants to local legacy media organizations.

Sofia Lemons – College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Department of Computer Science

I am working toward increasing the amount of openness in my Discovery course, CS408: Living in a Networked World, by creating an entirely open-licensed textbook, using another existing open-licensed textbook, and by having students publish their ideas on the web using the open source content management system Drupal. Because we also study copyright, copyleft, and open licenses in the course, this engagement with open materials and tools will deepen their understanding of these class concepts.

Donald Plante – University of New Hampshire - Manchester, Division of Science and Technology

Using open educational resources in the classroom will completely change the way my students interact with mathematics. Not only will our students benefit from a cost free textbook, they will also contribute to an ever-growing library of information about the mathematics found in everyday life. They will accomplish this by contributing their final project as a miniature “chapter” to our current textbook using the creative commons license. They will also be putting their thoughts in a public forum by blogging in an open environment online. Check them out at students.illustratingmath.com!

Patricia Jarema – College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, Department of Biological Sciences and Agriculture

Jennifer Purrenhage – College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, Department of Natural Resources and Environment

Patricia Jarema and Jennifer Purrenhage are curating, developing, and using OER to support research collaboration between students in wildlife techniques (NR 740) and biostatistics (BIOL 528) courses. The main objective is to facilitate a meaningful peer review experience, both from the perspective of students developing research proposals and students evaluating research design from a statistical perspective. Jarema and Purrenhage are working with students to curate resources for an online open-access ‘Research Collaboration’ guide: biostatistics students will curate resources to construct a hypothesis test decision-making framework, while wildlife students will curate resources to support the process of developing original research proposals.

Phil Ramsey – College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Department of Math and Statistics

My project currently applies to two courses, Math 737/837 Statistical Methods for Quality Improvement, and Math 740/840 Design of Experiments I. Both courses are now taught asynchronously using Tegrity videos and instructor prepared notes. Each class as one textbook required that is available free of charge to students from the UNH Library as an eBook; there are no educational materials costs to students in either course. In addition, for Math 740/840 I have created a YouTube channel containing over 40 videos that I have made for the course; the videos all have a creative commons copyright and can be freely used for noncommercial purposes. I am in the process of assigning creative commons copyrights to all of the course notes for math 740/840 and will make them freely available via Google Drive or GitHub (TBD). A similar effort is now underway for Math 737/837.

Liz Hebbard and Emilie Talpin have been working to develop their own manuals for Intermediate French I and II. They have consulted existing OER resources but also created their own. Although designing a whole textbook supported by their own self-corrected canvas assessment tools has been and continues to be a daunting task, it has also been a very rewarding experience that has pushed them to rethink their curriculum and the way material is presented to their students on a daily basis. Liz and Emilie are also dedicated to encouraging students to use library resources to further their knowledge and curiosity.

Nan Yi – College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Department of Chemical Engineering

CHE 705/805 (Fall 2016) will be taught as an elective chemical engineering course for undergraduates and graduate students. It explores the science and technology of both conventional and unconventional energy sources, such as fossil fuels (including crude oil, natural gas and coal), bioenergy, solar energy, wind, hydropower, and geothermal. Chemical science and engineering principles are used to investigate how to increase the efficiency of fossil fuels and how to practically implement sustainable energy technologies. Open Educational Resources (OER) is integrated as sources for readings and case studies.